U.S. House committee issued a scathing report on Thursday accusing National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden of lying about his background, feuding with co-workers and leaking secrets that “caused tremendous damage” to U.S. security.
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Stone, who met Snowden several times, said it wasn’t an easy task convincing him to make a movie about him: “He helped us with the film enormously but he didn’t have any control”.
Amnesty International and the American Civil Liberties Union launched their ‘Pardon Snowden’ campaign on Wednesday, urging President Obama to do so before he leaves office in January 2017.
Contrary to Snowden’s statements that he meant to reveal programs that intruded on the privacy of Americans, the House report concluded that the vast majority of the 1.5 million documents he stole “have nothing to do with programs impacting individual privacy interests”.
Another supporter of a pardon is journalist Glenn Greenwald, who wrote the first stories about Snowden’s leaks of mass NSA surveillance, both in the USA and worldwide. “You know, not that many people have talked about the NSA, so this is really hard-earned research and I think it’s very valid”, said Stone.
Snowden said Wednesday that he would return to the USA if he thought he could get a fair trial.
The report, the staffer said, contains new information and “contradicts” the image of Snowden as a principled whistleblower motivated by his concerns with systemic privacy violations by the NSA. Justice Department spokesman Marc Raimondi has said “there is no question his actions have inflicted serious harms on our national security”. The committee “found no evidence that Snowden took any official effort to express concerns about USA intelligence activities to any oversight officials within the US government, despite numerous avenues for him to do so”. Snowden, a 29-year-old former technical assistant for the CIA, revealed details of top-secret surveillance conducted by the United States’ National Security Agency regarding telecom data.
According to the committee, Snowden began mass downloads of classified material two weeks after he was reprimanded for engaging in a spat with NSA managers. The supporters called Snowden a hero for exposing the extent of government surveillance by giving thousands of classified documents to journalists.
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“Snowden” is an Oliver Stone film, made with Snowden’s cooperation.
